


You had me at meow

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Cats, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Steve McGarrett is a Crazy Cat Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 22:55:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18647788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: It starts with a mewling dumpster. Meka’s steps falter and he falls silent mid-sentence, so for a second, Danny freezes, automatically on high alert.Then he hears it. “Mew,” the dumpster says, full of woe.Or: When HPD Detective Danny Williams rescues a Navy SEAL’s cat from a dumpster, he doesn’t expect to be getting a visit from the entirety of the Governor’s elite major crimes taskforce in the middle of the night.





	You had me at meow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bgharison](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bgharison/gifts), [MissSlothy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissSlothy/gifts), [ArtichokeDip77](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtichokeDip77/gifts).



> I realize that this is a cat fic that comes pretty soon after the canon return of Mr. Pickles in 9.21, but it’s not episode related at all, so no spoilers here (except very obliquely for 5.17)! Any similarities (or contradictions) are complete coincidence, because 75% of this was written before we even knew the synopsis of 9.21.
> 
> This is respectfully (and a little out of the blue, which, I hope that’s okay) dedicated to [bgharison](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bgharison), [MissSlothy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissSlothy) and [ArtichokeDip77](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtichokeDip77), all three of whom were very encouraging about anything concerning Steve + cats when I posted a snippet of this fic to my Tumblr [almost two months ago](https://five-wow.tumblr.com/post/183194592583/six-sentence-sunday). At that point the project was honestly on the verge of being abandoned and their excitement about the idea was a huge part of what pushed this over the finish line because it made _me_ excited again, so I hope this is acceptable as a very late thank you for your replies, because I completely neglected to say that at the time. :D
> 
> And finally, the title… I have no excuses for the title, this time. I will not say sorry. I will love my bad puns and bad title choices unapologetically.

It starts with a mewling dumpster. Meka’s steps falter and he falls silent mid-sentence, so for a second, Danny freezes, automatically on high alert. They’ve been going door to door in the vain hope of finding a witness to a shooting that happened the evening before. They haven’t been received with open arms so far and it’s the kind of neighborhood that makes even Danny’s hovel look like the Hilton in comparison, so there’s good reason to be on edge.

Then he hears it. “Mew,” the dumpster says, full of woe.

Meka turns to him. “You catch that?”

“I did.” Danny frowns at the dumpster, at Meka, and back at the dumpster again. “I wish I didn’t,” he lies. Mostly lies. He’s already resigned himself to having to throw out this shirt and possibly the shoes too, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be grouchy about doing the right thing.

Together, they pry the heavy lid of the dumpster open. 

The only good part of it is that it proves that Meka is a real friend – the only one Danny has on this damn island, probably. He doesn’t let Danny go in alone just because he’s the new guy and a haole, which he’s pretty sure every other Hawaiian cop on the force would have tried to argue for. In fact, Meka comes out of it looking worse than Danny does, because he steps in what looks like a bucket thrown out with the dirty wash water still in it. There are chunks clinging to the hem of his pants leg that Danny doesn’t even want to look at, much less investigate.

But it’s worth it, because after a few minutes of digging through trash, Danny encounters something that’s warm and moving and to his immense relief not a rat, but a young, ginger-leaning-towards-yellow tabby cat. A quick check tells Danny that it could use a wash, but it’s not underfed or hurt, its fur looks healthy, its eyes are clear and it’s wearing a collar. 

“Found our victim,” he tells Meka, who seems almost comically relieved to be allowed to put an end to his short career as dumpster diver.

Once they’re back on solid, non-trashy ground, Meka gestures at their prize. “That’s not a street cat,” he points out. It’s an open door, but an important one. This is not a cat that’s intentionally been thrown out with the trash, so it probably climbed in here under the power of its own adventurous spirit and got stuck when the lid was closed, which means someone might be looking for it by now.

“Let’s see if you have a name,” Danny tells the cat, because you’re supposed to ask victims for ID instead of just feeling them up.

He fumbles around the collar, which is a plain yellow band, and finds a tag at the front that was mostly hidden in fur. He maneuvers cat and collar so that he can read it and encounters more words than expected. _My dad is a Navy SEAL, and if you kitnap me you’ll be sorry._

He raises his eyebrows at the cat. “Hello there, My Dad Is A Navy SEAL And If You Kitnap Me You’ll Be Sorry. Nice to meet you.”

Meka, who is reading over his shoulder, groans. “Really, Williams?”

“Don’t begrudge me my dad jokes, Hanamoa. They’re one of the few pleasures I have left in life.”

Meka reaches out a hand to pet the cat and it twists around in Danny’s arms to nudge at Meka’s hand in what is frankly a heart-meltingly adorable way. 

“Well,” Meka says, smiling at the cat because Danny got lucky in at least the regard that his partner and only friend is not a sociopath, “now you’ll get the pleasure of trying to find a place to drop this little lost boy off.”

*

Turns out there’s a convention about tropical fish in town, and that’s something of a problem. Apparently every single vet on the island would rather stare at Nemo’s cousins and gorge themselves on mai tais than help a haole cop identify some marine’s lost kitten by checking it for a chip. There’s exactly one clinic open in all of Honolulu and it doesn’t take anything less than dire emergencies, which Danny can’t seem to convince the person he talks to on the phone that this is. Heartless bunch of bastards, in Danny’s opinion.

Meka laughs. “Looks like she’ll get to have a sleepover at yours, brah.” That’s one thing they did manage to find out: it’s a girl cat, not a boy cat. Not that they needed a vet for that.

“At mine?” Danny inquires. “Why at mine? Why can’t you take her home with you?”

Meka adopts a sympathetic face that Danny doesn’t buy for a second. “Amy is allergic.”

And there’s really no arguing with that, as much as Danny wants to point out how unfit his shithole of an apartment is for a grown human to live in, let alone a teenage cat. He goes home that day with a dog transport cage in the backseat that he managed to convince the canine division to lend him by promising some favors. He remembers to crack a window when he dips into the store on the way to buy some food that is more appropriate for a cat’s diet than fruit loops or instant noodles. 

So far, so good. For some definition of good, anyway, even if it’s not Danny’s.

*

Of course his dubious luck doesn’t hold. It’s nearing eleven, and he’s just getting ready for bed, when someone kicks his door in. 

Not knocks on the door, not opens the door, not _tries_ to damage the door – actually kicks it in on a single try, breaking the hinges clean off and sending it flying down with a crash that has Danny’s blood pressure up in a fraction of a very scary second. His hand reaches for his hip on reflex, but there’s no gun strapped to his ratty sweatpants. Before he has a chance to look around for an improvised weapon, he’s flat on his back on the floor. There’s a guy, a very heavy guy, covering most of Danny’s body with his.

“What the fuck is happening?!” Danny manages to yell, but at the same time the guy yells some stuff right back at him that sounds like an identification. “What?” Danny asks, still yelling, because that’s just how it is now, apparently.

“Five-0,” the guy barks, like he’s annoyed Danny has the gall to be asking questions when supposed law enforcement storms his home for no apparent reason he can discern. The guy has one arm braced on Danny’s shoulder, the other holding a gun that’s trained on Danny’s head. It all makes Danny a little nervous – because of the gun, of course, not because this guy’s face is inches from his, even though he is a bit uncomfortably close and even more uncomfortably pretty. That would be completely the wrong thing to be thinking about right now. “Where is she?” the guy demands, forcefully. “Where’s the Captain?”

“Captain?” Danny repeats loudly, while he frantically considers his options. There don’t seem to be a lot of them. If this weirdo wants to shoot him, he’s dead. “What Captain? I don’t know of any Captain.”

The guy growls, and that would be an interesting sound in other situations where he could be on top of Danny. In this particular one it’s slightly worrying. “Don’t lie to me. We know you have her. The GPS signal led us right to your door.”

“Boss,” a different voice says, “I found her.”

When Danny cranes his neck, he can just about catch an upside-down glimpse of a very beautiful woman standing next to his bed, where there’s a wriggling lump under the blanket. She pulls the blanket from the bed and dumps it unceremoniously to the floor, which Danny decides not to protest considering the circumstances, but doesn’t appreciate a whole lot anyway. The woman uncovers the cat, which is now on its back in the middle of the mattress. It wriggles around to lock eyes with Danny, both upside down.

And the guy – he melts, there is no other word for it. Danny can actually _feel_ his entire body relax, and he has a front row seat to the fire and steel in man’s eyes abruptly turning into something gooey the moment he catches sight of the cat.

Soldier boy pushes himself up off of Danny’s body and the floor in one crazily fluid, stupidly hot movement. The next second, he takes the cat that the woman scooped up and now willingly hands to him, and he cradles it to his chest like it’s the most precious thing in the world, making soothing and cooing noises and pressing his nose to the cat’s furry head. The cat looks happy to see him, too, and it lets out a steady purr.

Danny stays right the fuck where he is, because he’s going to need a moment to catch his breath and to maybe consider if he isn’t having some extremely unusual wet dream. That’s when some things finally click.

“You’re the Navy SEAL,” he realizes, out loud, still lying flat on the floor. “You’re the Navy SEAL cat dad from the tag on her collar.”

The guy either ignores this or accepts it without question, because all he does is shift the happy cat to his shoulder and offer a hand to help Danny up. “Steve McGarrett,” he says. He sounds mostly normal now, when he’s not yelling and waving a gun around. “We’ll, uh, make sure your door gets replaced.”

“It happens,” Danny says, even though it doesn’t happen, or not to him, at least. Once he’s standing, he eyes Steve McGarrett and his weapons and the way he is covered in the interesting combination of Kevlar and cat hair. “We good now?”

Steve eyes him right back. It’s wary, but at least he’s not openly hostile anymore, which seems like a win with this type of crazy. “I’m assuming you didn’t kidnap her.”

“Kitnap, you mean?” Danny gives Steve a second to crack a smile, but Steve doesn’t. Difficult audience. “No, obviously I didn’t. I’m a homicide detective with HPD and I rescued her from a dumpster she’d gotten stuck in.”

“Homicide?”

“Cool your jets, tough guy. I wasn’t holding her here under suspicion of murder.”

Steve opens his mouth to answer, and it looks like things might be getting heated again – which Danny would welcome, because he likes yelling at people who annoy him and he still has some adrenaline to burn through from Steve’s less than subtle entrance – but the bouncy-haired woman who uncovered the cat interrupts.

“Hey brah,” she says, cool as anything, like there’s nothing awkward about storming a stranger’s place for no reason and then going completely ignored for a minute, “we didn’t mean to interrupt your evening.” 

Danny wants to laugh at that, because it’s a pretty mild way to describe what just happened, but he doesn’t know if he should. Who knows if Steve’s friends have a better sense of humor than he does. 

The woman holsters her gun, which he appreciates, and offers him a hand to shake. “Officer Kono Kalakaua, Five-0. You’re Detective Williams – we looked you up once we had the address. We appreciate that you took in our boss’s cat.”

Danny graciously lets all the blatant violations of his privacy go. “Your boss’s cat, huh? Five-0 is performing midnight raids to retrieve a pet that ran away from home?”

“It’s not midnight,” Steve butts in. “And the Captain didn’t run away, she got lost.”

Danny looks at Steve and his cat again. The cat seems perfectly content to stay draped over Steve’s shoulder and let itself be petted by Steve’s huge hands, and it’s the first time Danny feels he can really relate to what must be going on in its tiny cat mind. “Okay, let me ask you something – why is she called Captain? What kind of a name is that?”

Steve performs a careful one-shoulder shrug that avoids jostling any Captains. “I have to feed her when she wants to be fed and open doors for her when she wants to move, so clearly she’s higher in rank than I am.”

“Right, sure,” Danny says, because he’s never had a surplus of patience for crazy cat people. “Higher than you? What are you, then?”

“Lieutenant Commander, head of Five-0.” Steve taps the badge attached to his belt. Danny takes this as an invitation to unobtrusively ogle him a little.

“And a Navy SEAL.”

“Former. Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Steve pulls a face like Danny is very confusing and perhaps more than a little annoying to him. Danny gets to enjoy this expression for about five seconds while Steve studies him, before he seems to give up on trying to understand Danny and turns his attention back to the cat in his arms, holding it up to make eye contact. Just like before, the way his face transforms is almost miraculous.

“Hey. Hey, you,” he babbles, in a high, happy voice that seems entirely incongruous with everything about the way he looks, from his tac gear to his stubble to his muscles to his slightly haunted eyes. The weirdest part, though, is that he makes it work. The softness doesn’t look forced, it looks like it’s Steve’s natural state of being, and all the rest is nothing but a really good act.

So Danny is a little charmed. Sue him.

He’s distracted by a third armed stranger entering through the ruins of what used to be a perfectly functional doorframe. The guy steps over the splintered door on the floor like it’s a normal, everyday inconvenience and takes in the situation with a quick look around the room. He performs some form of silent communication with Kono before he zeroes in on Danny and extends a professional but friendly hand.

“Chin Ho Kelly,” he says. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

The fact that he just came in and immediately affixes an apology to his introduction makes Danny wonder how often Chin has to say sorry for his teammates’ bad habits. “Hey, it’s fine,” Danny says, because he feels a certain measure of sympathy for what he imagines must be Chin’s plight. And then, because he has to let go of Chin’s hand after a normal amount of time and it honestly hurts him a little, he allows himself to ask, “Are you sure you guys are running a major crimes task force, not a modelling agency?”

Kono smirks and Chin gives an amused little shake of his head, but Steve frowns. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Danny studies Steve’s confusion and can’t resist being an asshole, because something about Steve draws him out and gets him on his worst behavior. “Babe, if you didn’t get that, clearly how pretty you are is compensating for something.”

There’s a snort from Kono, but Danny can’t look over, because he’s too busy having a staring contest with Steve. Steve is the first to glance away, with a little huff that sounds to Danny like a capitulation, but also like it has a laugh buried somewhere deep in there. Hope for a sense of humor: restored.

Some of Steve’s seriousness returns when he addresses his coworker, but he still looks mellowed out in comparison to how on edge he was earlier. “Kono, can you get Max from the car? He needs to check her out.”

“There were no vets available tonight,” Danny says, which doesn’t seem to be a problem for Steve, but he has to say something, he thinks. They’re still in his home. Superfluous facts seem safer than doubling down on his flirting, because he doesn’t plan on learning the hard way what could go wrong if you hit on a guy with a gun that just entered your home by kicking down the door.

Not that he’s been very good so far at refraining from doing just that, but that’s no reason to push his luck.

“It’s fine,” Steve says. “We brought an expert.”

Kono slips away while Steve pets the cat and Chin just stands there, looking serene and handsome and unbothered. Danny needs to keep himself from staring at either of them, so he steps over to his bed to gather up the blanket and dump it on the mattress. The sheet is full of cat hair now, but he’ll just deal with it for one night, because there’s no way he’s going to bother changing the sheets at midnight. 

Kono comes back with yet another person in tow. The room is getting somewhat crowded now, because it was definitely never meant to be a spot to host impromptu door-kicking and cat-petting parties. This newest guy is smaller, wears glasses, appears to be unarmed except for a first aid kit, and all in all looks like the stereotype of a nerd. The way he steps up to Danny and almost mechanically holds out his hand for Danny to shake does nothing to dissuade from this first impression. 

“Max Bergman, ME,” the guy says. “You have a lovely home.”

Danny, once again, is completely in the dark about whether he’s allowed to laugh or not. This is apparently not a vet – it’s Honolulu’s medical examiner, whose job is poking dead bodies and who is now being brought in to poke a live cat. Danny hides his confusion behind some of his own wit. “Danny Williams, Detective. You should’ve seen it when it still had a door. It was even lovelier then.”

Max bobs his head and smiles somewhat awkwardly, like he’s having a couple of the same doubts Danny has. The he abruptly turns and heads for Steve. “Ah, Commander, you located Captain Kirk. How is she?”

Danny feels a burning need to interrupt again, so he does. “Kirk? Like in Star Trek? She’s named after _Captain Kirk_?”

“Yes, of course,” Max says, like this should have been self-evident. He gently pries the cat from Steve’s hands, who lets go without protest but with a slightly sad look. “She’s a companion to Mister Spock.”

Max takes Kirk over to the bed, which everyone in Five-0 apparently feels free to use as if it were their own. Once there, he deposits the cat and starts checking its ears. To his credit, he looks like he has some kind of clue what he’s doing. 

“Don’t forget the final front-ear,” Danny quips, which makes Max pause and look up in surprise.

“That is very amusing,” he says, seeming genuinely appreciative. “A good play on words, Detective Williams.”

His sense of humor’s ego restored, Danny turns to the now empty-handed Steve, who emits an aura of being stubbornly sheepish. His jaw is set and when he meets Danny’s eyes head on, he crosses his impressive arms over his chest, like he expects to be made fun of over this. Danny will happily oblige.

“Please,” he says. “ _Please_ tell me there is actually a second cat called Spock.”

“There is. She’s at home with Mary.”

Mary – figures a guy like Steve would be very married, probably with two and a half kids and a white picket fence around his nice beachfront house. “Ah, Mary.” Danny nods and hopes he’s not being weird. Not that Steve seems like a fair judge of weird. “Cool.”

Steve frowns. Danny has no clue at what or why, this time. “Mary is my sister,” Steve clarifies, without prompting from anyone. “She’s catsitting for me.”

“Right,” Danny says, and something about this whole situation makes a bright and bubbly feeling well up in his chest. Maybe it’s the sheer ridiculousness of everything that’s happened in the past ten minutes, maybe it’s his terrible lack of sleep over the past week – or maybe it’s the way Steve seemed to think it was important that Danny knew Mary wasn’t a wife or girlfriend. “Your sister is catsitting Mister Spock. Better hope she’s nice to him.”

“Her.”

“What?”

“Her. Mister Spock is a female cat.” 

Steve’s phone appears from one of the millions of pockets on his cargo pants, and before Danny can ask what’s happening now, Steve is holding the phone out to him, a picture of two cats on the screen. One is clearly the Captain, blond and looking just a little chubby in comparison, and the other is sleek and black and has intelligent eyes even when they’re half-lidded. Captain Kirk and Mister Spock are pressed together as close as two cats can get in the corner of a couch, paws and tails a tangled mess that would have made it impossible to determine where one cat ends and the other begins if their fur didn’t have such distinctive colors.

That feeling, the brightness, is expanding in Danny’s chest with alarming speed. He squints at Steve and tries to pretend Steve has nothing to do with The Feeling. “You’re a former Navy SEAL and now you spend your days taking care of your two lesbian sci-fi cats.”

“They’re not-” Steve starts, and then stops, frowns in a way that looks like it’s directed partly at himself, and shakes his head at Danny. “They’re not sci-fi cats. They’re perfectly regular lesbian cats.”

“Oh,” Danny says, and before he knows it he’s hitting the back of his hand to Steve’s chest despite it being covered in tac gear, because he’s a tactile creature and Steve is making him want to touch even more badly. “Regular lesbian cats, of course. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Steve says, and it’s a silly response, but he’s so earnest about it that Danny can’t even laugh at him. Damn him.

“Alright,” he says. “I won’t.”

Steve smiles – he _smiles_ , out of nowhere, like he’s just allowed to do that kind of thing without warning – and Danny is just about to completely make his peace with the sacrifice of one lousy door that never felt all that secure anyway, when Max interrupts this shining, hopeful moment he’s having. “Commander, I’m pleased to inform you that she appears to be in good health.”

It’s probably a sign of a disturbed mind to be repeatedly jealous of a cat that suspects nothing, but there will be time to reflect on that later. For now, Danny watches with very mixed feelings as Steve accepts his healthy cat back from Max. On the one hand, this probably means that Five-0 is about to finally clear out of the single room that constitutes as Danny’s home and allow him to catch some sleep. On the other hand, it probably means that cat dad Steve is about to leave, never to show his handsomely stubbled face again.

“I’m sure Detective Williams took good care of her,” Steve tells Max, which sends an odd ripple of amused reactions through the room. Even Max looks faintly tickled as he gathers up his medical supplies.

“Call me Danny,” Danny says, at which Steve nods, but Chin and Kono still look like they’re having an unreasonably good time. Danny feels like he’s lacking some context, but he doesn’t even have to voice the question.

“Steve’s trust is a very high honor,” Chin informs him.

Kono’s grin is showing a lot of pearly white teeth. “He didn’t even let me feed the cats until I passed a quiz.”

“Oh, shut up,” Steve says weakly, but he notably doesn’t deny that there was in fact a quiz, which Danny takes as evidence that Kono wasn’t exaggerating much, if at all.

“I’m very flattered,” he says. He aims for facetious, but he fails when he realizes that he means it. Damn. “I’m not even a cat person.”

Steve’s head whips around to him. He has gone from mellow to personally offended in a second flat. “You don’t like cats?”

Danny shrugs. At this point, he’s not too worried about Steve using his gun anymore. Steve already trusts him with his cat – apparently, they have a bond. Danny feels wholly free to be his full argumentative self. “I don’t mind them, but they’re not my favorite animal in the world.”

“Wow.”

“What, wow?”

“Nothing,” Steve says. “Just. Wow.”

Danny, never one to waste a perfectly good opportunity, looks Steve up and down at his leisure. “You don’t have the appearance of a typical cat lady either.”

Danny is vaguely aware of the rest of Five-0 quietly filtering out of his room, but he doesn’t pay them much attention. Neither does Steve.

“I think cats are amazing. They’re like adorable little ninjas.” It’s said with the vehemence of someone who feels _really_ strongly about this, which bemuses Danny, even after everything that just came to pass.

“Adorable little ninjas?” he repeats, just because he needs to make sure that’s really a combination of words that just came out of Steve’s mouth. “Are you serious? What’s next, small fluffy meow machines?” 

Steve scowls at him. There’s determination in his eyes, but if Danny didn’t know better, he’d say there is also a smudge of color to Steve’s cheeks. “You should come over some time and watch them. You’ll see.”

Danny narrowly avoids doing a double take. If this means what he thinks it means – what, okay, he _hopes_ it means – then it would explain the blush. “I should?” he asks, because he needs a little more. He needs a confirmation that they’re on the same wavelength here, because he might live in Hawaii now, but he’s not much of a surfer yet. “To, uh, to catsit?”

“No,” Steve says. “For coffee.”

Danny nods for Steve to continue, but nothing more seems to be forthcoming. He takes the prompting upon himself. “And cats. You want me to come over for coffee and cats.”

“And kisses,” Kono singsongs from right outside the door, where the rest of Steve’s team is evidently still lurking just out of sight and listening in on their conversation.

Steve goes _marvelously_ pink. Danny is mesmerized by the way his lashes fan over his cheeks when he looks down at the Captain in a transparent attempt to avoid Danny’s eyes.

“Okay.” It trips over Danny’s lips before he can consider the meaning of the word smooth. “You wanna, you know, have my number?”

Steve lets out a rush of breath and smiles in a way that’s kind of devastating. “Yeah. That’d be great.” He produces his phone from the same pocket as earlier, unlocks it and holds it out to Danny. Danny inputs his number and hands it back, and then they stand there, hovering opposite each other with a cat between them.

Danny has always considered himself pretty skilled at bullshitting his way through any kind of social situation, but this one stumps even him. What do you say to the really hot Navy guy who tackled you to the floor because he thought you kidnapped his cat and then responded to your flirting way more than you thought he would, to the point where now you’re probably going to meet his other cat and have coffee and hopefully make out?

“Hey, Steve,” Chin says, also from outside. When Danny tears his eyes away from Steve to look, Chin is in the door opening. “You might want to consider a more immediate compensation for the damage we did to Danny’s home.”

There’s that completely undeserved ‘we’, which means that Chin is again taking on blame that’s not even his. Danny appreciates Chin a lot.

As does Steve, it seems, because his face lights up. “Yeah,” he says, speaking to Danny again. “Let us rent you a hotel room, at least for the night, until we can get someone here to fix things. Five-0’s treat, of course.”

Danny looks at his rumpled sheets, covered in what looks like half a cat, and at the splintered door that’s still on the floor. The bed wouldn’t be so bad, probably, but the door looks like it might break clean through the middle if he tries to get it vertical again. Not to mention that propping it up against the doorjamb is really his only option to fix anything short-term, because it’s not like he has the requisite tools, a couple of new hinges and possibly a new lock hidden somewhere in his one-room broom closet of a home. 

Then Danny looks at Steve, hugging the cat and watching him expectantly, and he comes to the conclusion that the state of the place is a moot point anyway. He’d take Steve up on the offer just for the chance of maybe fifteen more minutes of bicker-flirting. 

“Give me a moment to pack a bag and collect any valuable stuff,” he says. He’s tempted to add that he’s not usually this easy, just to see if he could make Steve blush again, but he thinks he might save that for later. Maybe if he gets Steve to himself in the car.

For now, Steve looks approving and takes a seat on the edge of Danny’s bed, an obvious sign that Danny’s request for a few minutes has been granted. Danny stares at him until Steve raises an eyebrow. “We don’t have all night, Danny.”

“Don’t we?” Danny asks, be-practical-now-flirt-later plan already forgotten.

It’s subtle, but Steve totally does flush again. “Spock will be worried about the Captain,” he says, which is just such a ridiculous sentence that Danny can’t help but argue with him about it while he gets his duffel bag from the corner of the room and starts throwing clothes at it.

Steve argues right back, which is so wonderful that Danny gets distracted a lot. He tries not to look at Steve too much, but his eyes seem to be drawn that way. There’s something about the picture Steve makes, perched on Danny’s bed, lazily petting the cat curled up in his lap and doing something with his lips that looks barely shy of a smirk even while talking. 

Maybe, Danny reflects, it might be worth revisiting his opinion on crazy cat people.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I wish you many imaginary kittens and/or other animals of your choice which you think are cute. If you can, consider leaving a comment! ❤
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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